Nicole Chung: All You Can Ever Know - Lit on H Street

In Conversation with Jamise Harper and Lupita Aquino

This event will include ASL interpretation.

Join us for a special edition of Lit on H St Book Club featuring Nicole Chung! She'll be discussing her memoir All You Can Ever Know with book club leaders Spines & Vines (Jamise Harper) and Lupita Reads (Lupita Aquino). The book is 10% off in our store through January.

In her highly-anticipated debut, Nicole Chung investigates the mysteries and complexities of her transracial adoption. Told with the same startling insight that has made Chung a beloved critical voice, All You Can Ever Know is a profound and moving chronicle of unexpected family for anyone who has struggled to figure out where they belong.

What does it mean to lose your roots—within your culture, within your family—and what happens when you find them?

Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From childhood, she heard the story of her adoption as a comforting, prepackaged myth. She believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee. But as Nicole grew up—facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn’t see, finding her identity as an Asian American and as a writer, becoming ever more curious about where she came from—she wondered if the story she’d been told was the whole truth.

With warmth, candor, and startling insight, Nicole Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, which coincided with the birth of her own child. All You Can Ever Know is a profound, moving chronicle of surprising connections and the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets—vital reading for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong.

Named a Best Book of Fall by The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, TIME, Elle, and more.

"This book moved me to my very core. . . . [All You Can Ever Know] should be required reading for anyone who has ever had, wanted, or found a family—which is to say, everyone.” Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere

Nicole Chung has written for The New York Times, GQ, Longreads, BuzzFeed, Hazlitt, and Shondaland, among other publications. She is Catapult magazine's editor in chief and the former managing editor of The Toast. All You Can Ever Know is her first book. Follow her on Twitter at @nicole_soojung.

600 H St NE, Washington, DC 20002

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